This application is a supplemental request to fund the Engineering Core of the Boston University Core Center. The renewal of this core will provide critical assistance for the sharing of facilities, support personnel, equipment, and expertise; for the development of mechanisms for sharing data and models across laboratories; and for the promotion of scientific interactions among faculty in different laboratories at B.U. and other institutions in the area. Since the year 2000, a P30 Core Center grant has supported two cores: a Sound-Field Laboratory Core and an Engineering Core. The P30 Core Center grant, with the Sound-Field Laboratory, was renewed for five years starting January 16, 2006. This is a application to support the Engineering Core. The requested core support is designed to promote integrative, multidisciplinary collaborations involving auditory physiology, psychoacoustics, and computational modeling. The engineering core facility allows the archiving and analysis of data from groups working in different disciplines, the integration of modeling efforts that are distributed across different laboratories and at different levels of the auditory pathway, and provides general computer and technical support to all faculty and laboratories in the Core Center. This core and the support it provides are designed specifically to use resources efficiently, to promote collaboration, and to develop resources of general use to the hearing research community. Faculty who do research in hearing science and its applications came together from several schools and colleges in 1995 to form the Hearing Research Center (HRC) at B.U. for "the development and dissemination of knowledge that will improve the nation's auditory health and allow the fullest utilization of the sense of hearing." The work supported by the proposed core allows the full use and sharing of our resources and staff and extends our capability to use more complex data sets and more complex models of physiology and perception. These areas are critical for the understanding of hearing in complex environments, an area of great difficulty for listeners with hearing impairments or cochlear implants. [unreadable] [unreadable] Center Administration [unreadable] Program Director: Steven H. Colburn, Ph.D. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]